Announce: Spring Thing 2025

Competitions Spring Thing
1

2025-04-02T05:00:00Z→2025-05-09T05:00:00Z

Spring Thing is an annual festival celebrating new text-based computer games of all kinds. Originally founded as an off-season counterweight to IF Comp in the fall, the current incarnation of the Thing is a less competitive space with looser restrictions. Without the two-hour judging limit of IF Comp, for instance, longer games are welcomed (though shorter games are fine, too!) There’s no fee to enter, but you do have to submit an “intent to enter” in advance. And there are prizes!

The details can be found at the official Spring Thing site , but in brief:

  • Games must be debuts and in a well-polished state (bug tested, etc.)
  • You must submit an intent to enter by March 1st, 2025, and your game itself by March 30th.
  • Your game must be free to play, and will be archived on the Spring Thing site after the festival closes, although:
  • You can submit to the “Back Garden” to showcase a demo of a game you’re planning to sell, or a polished excerpt of something unfinished, or a game that cannot be archived.
  • You can submit revisions of previously released games to the “New Game Plus” section. Revisions need to be substantial, such as porting a game to a dramatically different system or adding substantial new graphics or new content.

Entrants to the Main Festival can be nominated for one of two “Best In Show” ribbons, and all entries are eligible for custom “Audience Awards.” Prize donors also gift fun, unique prizes , which Main Festival entrants have a chance to receive.

The festival is always looking for prize donors . If you have a cool idea for a prize that fellow IF authors might enjoy, let me know!

Check out the site for more info, and I’m happy to answer any questions here or sent to brian at springthing.net . Thanks, and happy writing,

–Brian Rushton

38 Likes
2

Just a bit of feedback about the festival website: the “submit” page really buries the lede on where to go to actually submit your intent. I eventually found it, but sticking it in the middle of a paragraph doesn’t make it easy to find.

Anyway, I’m in, and we’ll see whether I can actually finish in time or not!

6 Likes
3

I ran into that last year—it’s intentional, to cut down on spam by ensuring people properly read the page.

6 Likes
4

I’m glad you’ve joined! Daniel’s right, the previous organizer did it on purpose to reduce spam, but I’m not sure if it’s needed anymore; maybe next year I’ll try making it more obvious!

4 Likes
5

After discussion with entrants, I’ve decided this year to allow more than 1 entry per person in the back garden area, with a total limit or 3 per person.

The total of all submissions needs to still be under 100 MB. This new rule is meant to be for a small set of related games, but could also apply to some larger games.

If anyone wanted to submit different games to different parts of the competition, there could still be at most 1 in the main entry or the new game plus entry, and all other entries would need to be in the back garden.

There is still a limit of 1 game per entrant in the New Game Plus section as it would be very tempting for an author to promote their whole back catalog by doing some cosmetic upgrades to their games and dumping them all in the Spring Thing at once.

8 Likes
6

Hooray! This year, I promise to finish my game starting with “O” so I get the whole alphabet. It’s … experimental, and an unexpected sequel to something else I wrote. But I can at least have it well tested.

I like allowing >1 entry in the back garden too. Hopefully nobody will just dump stuff there but I think it will be great as someone will probably have 2 odd entries they can’t decide between & ST will be better for having both.

9 Likes
7

I’m looking forward to your work, and thanks for the feedback!

5 Likes
8

Link below

If you want to get around this rule, you could submit an “anthology” collecting several shorter works (providing each is complete and tested), or if you really want to get around it you could submit under an alias.

I’m not saying I’m planning to try that, but do the rules already officially allow you to submit more entries under a different identity? :sweat_smile:

1 Like
9

I don’t do identity verification and it does say that, so yes.

1 Like
10

Hi Brian. I have just shared our next year’s Senica Thing topic on a workshop with our growing community here. We are really enthusiastic to enter the Spring Thing again next year.

Just asking about sets of related gamebooks (we are far below 100 MB) - if some authors feel corageous enough to enter the main competition, shall they send their entries individually, or can we keep for such cases the same format as in Back Garden?

And finally, knowing our annual outcome, would you recommend any of the authors to enter the Main Festival, if you know that it is reviews, not medals which they are looking for? If all the same so, what additional criteria would you apply to ensure only real quality entries?

I have my own special feeling about two or three particular authors (Raiden, Lilian Lalonder, Hailey) who have generated some attractive content, but am interested in hearing yours.

Thanks.

8 Likes
11

Wonderful! It sounds like there will be some fun games to enter.

First of all, I’ll apply the same rules to your students as I would to anyone else entering the main competition. So I would accept any entry as long as it is:
-Finished (no obviously empty passages or places the author didn’t fill it out), and
-Tested (the best would be by people outside of the school but inside would be good, too)

Those are the official rules here: Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction

Moving games to the Main Festival likely won’t increase reviews (last year Deep Dark Wood got 6 reviews, and only 4 out of the 33 games in the comp got more reviews than that). Anthologies tend to stand out in a good way; for instance, Ryan Veeder usually does an anthology game for Ectocomp, and often wins, but this year split up his games. Each game got less reviews than usual and overall placed lower due to itch penalizing games with few ratings.

All that’s speaking as an organizer. Speaking as a player and as a person, I think that your best students have improved a lot over time and have put out some work that’s genuinely fun. However, compared to the work a lot of adults enter, it could be stronger. ‘At The Strike of Twelve’ took last place in Ectocomp Petite Mort, even though it had a lot of good in it. So the competition definitely goes up a notch once they’re entering these things outside of Senica Thing.

One thing that could help serious authors a lot is adding a little bit of decoration to the game. The Twine Grimoire is great for teaching how to do this: The Twine Grimoire, Vol. 1 by Grim Baccaris. You don’t have to change the decoration (here is an example of a Main Festival game from last year that was fun without it: Thanks, but I don't remember asking) but it doesn’t take too much time and makes a big difference. There is also an option in the twine menu to make a ‘proofing copy’ of the text of the game that you can run through grammarly to fix bugs.

You don’t have to spend a ton of time to make a fun game (some authors can throw together something amazing in just a week or two) but they often have more experience that helps them know what to do in that time. For students, figuring out how things work can take a long time and be a lot of work.

So, I would recommend that you don’t assign anyone to the Main Festival, but if someone is genuinely passionate about their game and wants to grow as an author (and has time to finish all branches and test it for typos and bugs and make something they’re proud of) then that should be fine. I won’t deny any submissions for this upcoming Spring Thing main festival unless they are clearly unfinished or buggy.

5 Likes
12

That sound fair. I checked the Grimoir and it looks like a handy tool for some extra writing sessions and a couple more gamebooks to try a thing or two before looking up to Main Festival. What we are going to do is not accepting unfinished stuff to pass it to you on the first place, but keeping it just on our local webpage

This way we will end up this year with two basic levels:

  1. unfinished/buggy gamebooks accepted just for Senica Thing
  2. more or less polished works selected for Spring Thing - Back Garden

If anyone feels like joining the Main Festival, they should be more proactive, take the reins of communication from my hands and stand for it (contacting organizer, have the game tested, debug, log and actively communicate at intfiction.org etc.)

4 Likes
13

Sounds great!

2 Likes
14

Today is the last day to submit intents! I’ll change the page when I wake up tomorrow to no longer accept them. Thanks to those who have already submitted!

9 Likes
15

Intents are closed!

All authors, I sent an email to the account you registered under. If you don’t see it, it is probably in your spam folder. Please check, and if it is in spam, please mark it as ‘not spam’ to help it reach other people!

Thanks!

12 Likes